Brooke Kenney, staff writer at the Business Gazette in Maryland, describes her reaction to Derusha author Ranjit Chatterjee and his spiritual autobiography, Goy:
Spend just a few minutes talking with Silver Spring's Ranjit Chatterjee, and you'll realize he has little interest in the mundane. Read just a few pages of his new memoir, "Goy," and you'll learn what does interest him – adventure, family, philosophy and Jewish studies with a dash of linguistics on top.
The book is a flowing combination of all these areas, with Chatterjee recounting his life from childhood and mixing in Jewish history and culture as well as philosophical explorations along the way.
To hear his life experiences recounted in his book, you might think he has lived the life of 10 men. He had an affair with a married woman he met on a badminton court. He took a freight boat across the Pacific to visit his native India. He learned photography, married and divorced a Japanese artist and ate turtle soup on Mexico's Isla Mujeres.
He has traveled all over the world. Born in Calcutta, he earned various college degrees in Delhi, Prague, Jamaica and Chicago. He speaks English, French, German, Czech, Bengali, Hindi and a little Caribbean Creole.
He says he didn't seek out adventure, but rather found it through happenstance and circumstance. He had expected to live his entire life in India.
The book's title is a Yiddish word for a non-Jew that also can mean "a nation."
Chatterjee does not consider himself Jewish, but instead a scholar of Judaism. He was inspired to learn about the religion and culture by various people in his life, not the least of which were his parents.
One story the author writes about is when his mother told him a disturbing Holocaust story. Ranjit was only about 6 years old, but his mother decided to tell him a horrific story about Nazis who buried Jewish people up to their waists and then sent in vicious dogs to attack their upper bodies. That was really the beginning, he says, of his interest in the plight of Jewish people.
"I know that my father was never any kind of racist, which is very common in India," Chatterjee says.
His father was a surgeon in the Indian army who was commissioned to serve with the British army in North Africa and Europe during World War II. His father almost never spoke of the atrocities he witnessed.
"Once, in the presence of an elderly Jewish friend of mine," writes Chatterjee, "the conversation at the dinner table turned to his war experiences. My father got up from his chair to leave the room so abruptly that the chair back broke and the painfulness of the memories of what he knew or had seen was amply confirmed."
In addition to earning a doctorate in Slavic languages and having his dissertation published as a book, Chatterjee co-edited "Tropic Crucible: Self and Theory in Language and Literature" (1984) and wrote "Wittgenstein and Judaism: A Triumph of Concealment" (2005). The latter book is about an Austrian philosopher who, Chatterjee argues, was secretly a Jewish thinker who had to mask his ideology because of the anti-Semitism of the time.
Chatterjee now works as an adjunct professor of English at the University of Maryland University College and as a senior research scholar at the Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland.
Chatterjee wrote the bulk of the book about 10 years ago when he had some free time after a move from Chicago to Washington, D.C. About two years ago, he heard of a small publishing company called Derusha and decided to submit his manuscript for consideration. They took on his work.
He says he wrote the book for his children and for other who may know him, but not know his entire life story.
"There's no one person who sort of tracked me throughout my life," he says. "And if I didn't put it all down, nobody would know."
And the author, with his typical modest tone, explains why he thought others might want to read about him.
"I think it's a bit of a unique life."
"Goy" is available for purchase at www.amazon.com.
